It was one of those days when the sea spray was especially corrosive, seeming to infect and splatter everything with stinging salt. A strong western gale didn’t help matters, but Marley knew that the sea spray probably would have come anyway. Saline drip smell came flooding into his basement lab, nearly filling every open container, box, syringe case, beaker, burner, and test tube with a fine grain of salt. One of the consequences of living so close to the ocean, but today was really too much.

The shit had really hit the fan for Marley sometime after breakfast, just as he was finishing his bit of eggs and toast that he had whipped up sometime before four in the morning. He had taken his breakfast down to the lab, where he was planning to continue refining his latest sugar formula. This new formula was going to be great because not only did the duration of the effects increase by 150 --a remarkable figure to be sure—but now he was able to completely synthesize three more important amino acids right there in his lab, drastically cutting down its original cost. Cutting costs always made Marley happy, so it was supposed to be a good day, filled with many successful batches of sugar, and a million or so happy customers around the globe. Things were going good too, until Marley dropped a bit of egg into one of the beakers that contained liquid sugar.

At first nothing really happened, and the yellow bit of egg just sort of floated in the blue soupy mixture of liquid sugar. Then from nowhere, the sugar began to froth and boil, splashing all over the table and even getting on other beakers filled with sugar. A sharp smell of rotten eggs filled the air, and the almost neon blue liquid sugar became a disgusting, lumpy brown. The glass itself began to steam, and eventually began to melt.

When Marley first noticed, he nearly knocked all of his other and he rushed to find something to stop the reaction. He tried putting in every base and acid stopper he could think of, but nothing seemed to work. The glass kept on hissing and boiling, and it was clear that whatever was in the beaker had begun to eat its way into the table. He kept pouring more acid neutralizers into the beaker, which now had completely lost its glass bottom, the brown liquid sitting and steaming on the floor. It probably would have continued to eat its way down into the ground had Marley started dumping bottles of Clorox on the acid--or what he thought was acid--, which did eventually stop the steaming. But now a good portion of his sugar batches were ruined, because they all were now contaminated with whatever that…stuff was. He looked at the now melting beaker, and managed to make out the serial number of the batch that it had once contained: AMB

It was still before five o’clock, and he could barley remember what had been batch number AMB. Not that it really mattered, because whatever it had been in the batch was now completely ruined. It wouldn’t be practical, or ethical, to put that sort of garbage out on the streets. If it had that reaction with just a bit of egg, he didn’t even want to think about the reactions it could have.

So he spent the rest of the morning cleaning up his ruined experiments, all the while wondering, “What the hell did I put in that stuff?” For legal reasons, he kept all of the sugar formulas in his head in order to prevent them from being stolen by police or his competitors, not that anybody bothered to come visit him in person unless it was to pick up a shipment or some sort of dire emergency. He had remembered finding some interesting chemical in one of his old college chemistry textbooks, but he wasn’t sure if it was some sort of element, an amino acid, a combination of the two, not that it mattered anyway. He was going to stick with the regular formula that he knew, and that would be the end of it. “No more experimenting for a while,” he said, “not until I can remember what was in that stuff.” But as he was cleaning up, he found some stained slips of note paper that were probably supposed to be thrown away, but for some reason was lying in a crumpled pile near his stockpile of sodium:

Shipment Received

Boxes: number LKX-76

12 Boxes: number 7787

30 boxes: number AMB

Payment Due: $189345.29

Ernesto Castrana

Expect payment within 1-2 weeks of delivery

That was before noon. Now it was almost six at night, and he still had no word from Ernesto. If he was an idiot and had taken the sugar even after he called…well the world already had too many idiots as it was, but he was one of his best customers. Saving his customers were the most important thing right now, and if a bit of sunny side up egg could burn a hole in the floor…